Rick Ankiel sunk all the way down to the lowest minor leagues of professional baseball. He missed the 2002 season with an injury, then blew his arm out completely in 2003. After recovering from surgery, he briefly returned to the major leagues, but he couldn’t find his control. So in 2005, at the age of twenty-six, he decided he wouldn’t be a pitcher anymore. He would play in the outfield.

In professional baseball, pitchers don’t just become outfielders. The game is much too highly specialized for that. The last player to have a career that included winning over ten games as a pitcher and hitting over fifty home runs as a hitter was Babe Ruth, who retired in 1935.

Like Ivanovic, Rick Ankiel was licked before he began, but he began anyway. He played as an outfielder in the minor leagues, steadily improving as a hitter. And then one day in 2007—six years removed from the wild pitch that took away his control forever—the St. Louis Cardinals called Rick Ankiel back to the major leagues as an outfielder. When Ankiel went to bat for the first time, the game had to be paused because the crowd’s standing ovation was so long and so loud. Rick Ankiel hit a home run in that game. Two days later, he hit two more home runs. His throws from the outfield were phenomenally accurate—among the best in baseball. He would go on to play as a center fielder in the major leagues for six more years. Today, the most recent player to have won over ten games as a pitcher and hit over fifty home runs as a hitter is Rick Ankiel.

I give the yips one and a half stars.

AULD LANG SYNE

I FIND IT FASCINATING that in a world where so much is so new, we welcome a new year by singing “Auld Lang Syne,” which is a very old song. The chorus starts out, “For auld lang syne, my Jo, for auld lang syne / We’ll take a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne.” Jo is a Scots word that can be straightforwardly translated to “dear,” but auld lang syne is more complicated. It literally means something like “old long since,” but it’s idiomatically akin to “the old times.” We have a phrase in English somewhat similar to “for auld lang syne”—“for old times’ sake.”

Here’s a bit of my old long since: In the summer of 2001, the writer Amy Krouse Rosenthal emailed Booklist magazine to inquire about a review. At the time, I was working for Booklist as a publishing assistant; most of my job was data entry, but I also answered many of the low-priority emails that came in. I responded to Amy with an update on the status of the review, and I also mentioned that on a personal note I loved her zine-like column in Might magazine. I told her I often thought about one snippet she’d written, which went, “Every time I’m flying and the captain announces the beginning of our descent, the same thing goes through my mind. While we’re still pretty high above the city, I’ll think, If the plane went down now, we would definitely not be OK. A bit lower, and no, we still wouldn’t be OK. But as we get real close to the ground, I’ll relax. OK. We’re low enough; if it crashed now, we might be OK.”